Amazon to Offer One Full Year of Free Cloud Services

Amazon believes that Cloud services are the future. They believe it so much, in fact, that starting November 1st, new AWS customers are being offered afreeyear of usage on the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

“We’re excited to introduce a free usage tier for new AWS customers to help them get started on AWS,” said VP Adam Selipsky. “Everyone from entrepreneurial college students to developers at Fortune 500 companies can now launch new applications at zero expense and with the peace of mind that they can instantly scale to accommodate growth."

Further, Amazon is tossing in 25 hours of its SimpleDB database service per month, 100,000 requests per month for use of Amazon Simple Queue Service for message store and forwarding, and 100,000 requests and notifications per month over HTTP networks and 1,000 notifications via email for Amazon Simple Notification Service.

Just a Springboard

While the free tier will allow developers to launch an application at no cost, it should be noted that if applications become popular enough to outstrip the offer's capacity, the EC2 pay-as-you-go rates will immediately kick in. The offer also contains significantly less storage than Amazon's entry-level paid service (160 GB of instance storage at 8.5 cents/hour.)

At the end of the day it's still free, and will likely be difficult for beginners to turn down. It also piggybacks nicely on the sFund (a $US 250 million dollar pot for social Web development, backed by heavy hitters including Amazon) and the it's-all-about-developers theme.

If you're ready to get started, check out the details of Amazon's new offering here.